: Ah! The answer to that question is: So you can make a
: scenario dealing with searching for the Dream, just to
: give another possible seed for a GURPS based solo!
There's over 40 definitely undiscovered Dreams that you could search for instead. And if Thrall and Bonemen and Wights and Soulless and Shades are all products of the Dream of Unlife, then it must be that new variations of the Dream, or new spells to use in conjunction with it, are constantly being discovered. The player could always go search for one of these variations, which would be just the same kind of scenario as searching for the Dream itself.
: That's like writing a world history book but not reading
: about the 1900s to the present.
Not really--he played the levels after "Shiver." He just didn't finish that one level.
: Hmmm, that's a little too vague... even IF the big D
: still survived inside Phelot, I doubt anyone would
: call that "flourishing" with the Light.
: Besides, what Bungie originally planned and what
: Bungie finally planned are two different things, they
: wouldn't let such an obvious mistake get by just
: because it was part of the scrapped story, either.
Yeah. So they must have let it get by because it's part of the real, finalized story. :-)
There's about a thousand ways to reconcile what we saw in Shiver with the Deceiver's survival. It could have been an illusion; he could have occupied Phelot's body (and yeah, that could be considered flourishing, to have a cool new undead immortal walk-on-air body); the Deceiver we see in-game could have been some poor old guy the real Myrdred was controlling from a distance. I don't particularly espouse any one of these--I just think the Phelot one would make for the neatest followup story.
: Ack, you're dying! How can you say that Thrall are
: pathetic! Don't look at the individual, look at the
: BIG PICTURE. Thrall are the Backbone of the Dark
: forces. Wights, Soulless, Myrmidons, Bonemen, are
: limited forces that do not nearly number in the large
: amounts of Thrall.
: Without the Thrall, the Dark would not have lasted long
: at all during both Great Wars.
Yeah. There's lots of Thrall. So what? Dwarves are the backbone of the Light explosives contingent. Does that mean that Dwarf cocktails are über-powerful, the pinnacle of explosive technology? Far from it. Warlocks can throw much more powerful fireballs; archmages can cast the Dispersal Dream. But because those are powerful and unusual spells, relatively few people can wield them. Dwarf grenades are the most useful precisely because they're low-level and easy to make and use.
Same thing with Thrall. Any halfway-competent necromancer can make a few hundred Thrall, because they're so low-grade and *don't* require any Dreams or other high-class spells to make. So the Dark uses lots of them.
Dreams are used infrequently because of the great skill and energy cost it takes to wield them, but they have tremendous effects when they *are* used. We can see this pattern in the Dispersal Dream, the Binding Dream, and the Confinement Dream. The Thrall-making spell is exactly the opposite--doesn't produce a particularly impressive kind of undead, but it gets used all the time because it's an easy one.
: The apex of Thrall- Thrall, as a group, killed Mazzarin,
: the most powerful Light Avatar of all the Four Ages. I
: think I do not need to say any more about this.
Yeah, a few thousand Thrall, backed up by The Watcher--the most powerful of the Fallen Lord's sorcerers after Balor himself and (perhaps) The Deceiver--managed to ambush Mazzarin and kill him at the expense of over 6/7 of their number . What amazing creatures. :-P
--SiliconDream
